Swallowing Your Pride - Can Family Farms Still Afford to Be Split Up?

[cottonpicken]

Economy of scale isnt as a simple concept as people
think.

And trying to compare farming operations to one
another seems dumb to me.

And leveraged for profits also means leveraged for
losses.

[TOM4CWB]

Shaney,

The concept of a family itself OWNING 10,000 ac is not reality. A farm operation in the vast majority of situations includes 40-70 percent rented or crop share land base. The equipment and logistics infrastructure to handle the this size of land base often itself takes a generation to develop. This infrastructure in itself is an achievement of valour and hard work!

For the vast majority of grain farms an owned land base of 50-100percent is simply not realistic unless it is multigenerational heritage land holdings!

[Hopperbin]

V walk the walk are you serious??? One day you farmiing and the next your not?
Where do you get that from? I didn't say split it up no matter what. I said split it up fairly. If you don't someone marrying in will no shit man get a grip.

[grassfarmer]

vvalk,
Doesn't the Hutterite model show that splitting the operation to expand it does work? They do it all the time when they start new colonies. Love them or hate them they seem to have one of the more sustainable and successful business models in Western Canadian agriculture today - and about the only group that all their kids still want to farm.

[Hopperbin]

Statistically walk the walk you land base will be toast in 2 generations statistically so so we will be able to walk on walk land literally and say it is ours. No one needs that shit even your kids.

[vvalk]

When Hutterites split they share resources like one big colony for years until the new colony is big enough to run on its own. Absolutely no comparison to family farms that break/split up.
Hopper not sure what you are trying to say since what you write is very hard to understand. What I said is that as soon as you hae to buy out the equity in your farm from siblings( and this can include a divorce, we went through this) you essentially loose a generation trying to do this. Never said you stop farming, you just spin your wheels.
Just saying that in GENERAL if you want to split up farms because siblings can't get along you will have a very hard time being a competitive, expanding farm. If you can work out getting along I believe you will have a much strionger entitiy. Would much rather have half of a great farm them 100% ownership a farm trying to stay afloat because I needed to be the boss.

[ado089]

I don't think lamnd should ever be split off to non farming sibblings. It makes alot more sense from a tax and sustainability perspective to help the farming child to buy the land from the older generation, like a rent to own type set up and divy up cash at the end of the day. At least that way if down the road no one wants to farm anymore you're not paying 125 years of capital gains on the land and in the meantime the integrety of the farm is maintained. Joint ventures can be useful tool in the meantime for those that can't always play nice with their idiot little brother or stubborn old man. And for gods sake keep the wives as far apart from each other as possible. That's what I learnt from dealing with alot of different farms in alot of different situations.

[cottonpicken]

Well said ado.

[shaney]

I think that getting an understanding of the correlation of farm location to opinion on this issue would be interesting.

I think many of the opinions expressed here are a peer into your personal business philosophy. For many the farm is a lifestyle and for others its a business. Both strategies have advantages and disadvantages but the decision is personal.

Where I live, if you choose the lifestyle approach you are going to get run over by the much larger majority that are trying to expand their farms. To each his own I guess.

[charliep]

On the farm size issue, you might look at a study MNP did for Alberta Agriculture. Conclusion is size doesn't as much as what you do with what you have (similar to other things in life).

[URL="http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/econ13232"]Economics of Farm Size[/URL]

[ado089]

That's just what people with small one's say to save face.